“Long Weekend”

Reviewer: Andrew Yuen
Performance: 9 June 2016

It is incredibly jarring to stroll through the quaint and idyllic Dakota Crescent estate and then walk into the pre-show madness of Kenneth Chia’s Long Weekend. If Dakota Crescent is Singapore’s peaceful exterior, Long Weekend is the hidden interior, full of psychic repression.

The play takes place within the head of one Han Lin, mourning the loss of his lover, Keith. They are similar, lanky and with impish grins and bursting with shared anecdotes. Keith appears inside Han Lin’s head. They joke about being afraid of passing fishermen catching them holding hands near the beach (Han is a closeted gay man) and making up stories about neighbours in the opposite block. One makes promises to another not to let his eyes wander at urinals.

The play is terrific in certain places. In a surrealistic set piece, a receptionist in childbirth screens patients at a mental health clinic. The scene ramps up in intensity as the patients are vetted and shuffled out in order of urgency by the irate receptionist. Great stuff.

This play does not require you to be gay to understand it fully. It does help, however, to be familiar with certain references, such as when the characters lament the loss of “Play”, a gay club. While it is easy to understand Han Lin’s  grief, the intimate scenes between him and his lover tend to meander and drag. As they lie on the floor and have loose and flowy conversation, I found myself wishing for the next scene. From the outside looking into a relationship between two people, it is difficult to empathise fully.

In another scene, a group of characters are packing some boxes. The dialogue and direction here give the audience a sense of being flies on a wall, watching these people and their candid friendships between one another. Great stuff.

In short, this play is analogous to a long weekend. It is great in parts. As things wind down it begins to meander. There are sudden tonal shifts, never telegraphed. It is a fun thing now. Now, it’s a emotional thing.

Interesting but kind of uneven.

“Delightful, unique and funny, but could be better explained”

Reviewer: Meera Nair
Performance: 17 June 2016

Forty-five minutes of non-stop laughter interspersed with utter confusion may be a rather mind-boggling description, but it is best way I can sum up the experience of watching Balek Kampung.

Through its plot, Balek Kampung draws comparisons between satirical sketch shows and futuristic dystopian storylines. The play sets Singapore a hundred years in the future, where the country is ruled by an artificial consciousness composed of the minds of the greatest Singapore leaders and citizens. While the premise is unique, the execution lacks coherence and leaves too many unanswered questions that mar the experience of the production. For instance, we never learn why the AI has a spiritual awakening, or where the alien written language that it uses comes from. There is also a disjunction between how ‘Balek Kampung’ appears to be a radio broadcast by Symphonic 924, but the memories dredged up by the AI are visual rather than auditory.

That is not to say that Balek Kampung doesn’t entertain. Playwright David Khoo has a gift for comedy and the funny moments make the play a delight to watch. From the news reports of uncles not wanting to be uncles in Singapore 2115 to the antics of Give-Way Glenda and Move-In Martin in the present, the audience is left in stitches. Actor Darren Guo deserves praise for his comedic portrayals, beginning with his perfectly gormless look during a sketch on ‘VR Man’ and his arch-nemesis ‘Click-Click Man’, to his version of Phua Chu Kang that could give Gurmit Singh a run for his money. Hadfiz Abdul Rahman dons a sari for his hilarious portrayal of a stereotypical Indian auntie during the Phua Chu Kang sketch. Through the play, David Khoo demonstrates a breadth of knowledge on Singapore culture, grounding the play in Singapore despite its futuristic premise.

As an idea, Balek Kampung is promising, but the script could do with more tightening to address the questions and inconsistencies. That said, I would love to see more from David Khoo in the future.

“People Watching”

Reviewer: Jorah Yu
Performance: 18 June 2016

Cafe is a study of people. Singaporeans, to be exact. It looks at what we do, what we don’t do, and what we sometimes wish we did but never managed to do. It’s a big question mark on our choices, reflected by the characters questioning their past and present decisions and what led them to their current state.

The play involves five characters: two working ladies reminiscing and three waiters in a restaurant waiting for their shifts to end.

How did their decisions get them to this point?

The setting is simple, and rightfully so. Minimalist lights hanging above a coffee bar that’s complete with what seems like an actual commercial brewer; a set of table and chairs sit on the side for customers to come and laze around in.

This gives quite the perspective. Having worked as a waiter before, I find the interactions between the three staff members hilarious. The manager who’s too nice, the problematic part-time student, and that one guy who’s good at his job, but has a crappy attitude. The scenario’s so familiar it’s as if one is actually sitting at a table nearby, watching through the corner of your eye.

Oh, and the language is an absolute delight.

To be honest, I don’t think anything except Singlish will work in this context. It sets the mood and the context – casual, local, and slack. The Malay manager speaks with such accustomed wit while calling his fellow colleague a ‘cheenah babi’ – jokingly, of course – that everything clicks into place with just that slight shift in language.

At the end of the day, I do think that this is the sort of play that people call ‘acquired taste’. It’s a fine balance between abstract ideas and reality, pressing on the problems that we don’t ask ourselves every day. Nonetheless, a show well done.

“Being and Nothingness”

Reviewer: Alex Foo
Performance: 18 June 2016

The manager in Café (Erwin Shah Ismail) exclaims on more than one occasion that “this is a crisis!”. The real crisis, however, is having to sit through this agonizing play, which is as tepid as a latte left to sit for too long and as slow as service in the café.

But I think that’s precisely the point here: that nothing happens.

Percolating through the script are observations on a very contemporary sense of entitlement and lack of compassion. The play contrasts a wide range of population demographics and juxtaposes them. These include the office worker with First World Problems (deliberating between a mocha and a macchiato) complaining about an ex-convict’s poor service (half-convincingly played by Joshua Lim). Zee Wong delivers a riveting portrayal of a mercurial, judgmental and blithely self-obsessed narcissist. The showdown in the final scene is ugly, carnivorous and searing.

The playwright, Joel Tan, has a remarkable ear for dialogue and a mordant sense of humour. That much comes through here, capturing what is pretty much the ‘if it’s not on Instagram, it didn’t happen’ zeitgeist to hilarious effect.

The bigger question is what Tan is trying to achieve with his play.

What is new in Café is Tan’s experiment with absurdism. Audience anticipation and expectations demands that something is about to happen, especially when every character is desperate to leave. Yet there is no dénouement, and the exit door is nothing but an empty symbol. There is no follow up as to what happens to these characters after they leave, nor, I suspect, do any of us really care.

As a dissection of society’s ills and neuroses, Café is incisive. Ryann Othniel Seng’s atmospheric sound design – crackling thunder, the hissing of the milk steamer, and thunderous plops of water – echoes much of the characters themselves, all sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Instead, a rankling sense of emptiness in the play pervades in all five characters, and hollers at the heart of the play.

“The Cave”

Reviewer: Dawn Teo
Performance: 10 June 2016

Written by Annabel Tan and directed by Benjamin Chow, The Cave is a monologue written to explore the female body.  The space is simple yet intriguing. A single character, Eve (played by Selma Alkaff), dressed in whites, is walking around in a dream state blowing bubbles. All this while, audience members would enter, settle down and observe her go about this ritual until the show starts.

It is a clever way to immerse the audience into the experience and let the atmosphere sink in. Besides that, the set is aesthetic and functional at the same time. With the use of the imagination and the entire alphabetical jigsaw play mat, Selma transforms the set into usable props such as a baby, a desk and even the mouth of a cave.

Despite the space constrains and the set, I feel that more stillness can be used to hold her presence apart from the constant movement. Though some gestural illustrations are vivid and enhance the story-telling, it is too overwhelming at some points and some directional variations are unnecessary.

With that, some portions of the text are lost and cannot be heard clearly. Together with the use of sound, the voice gets drowned out. That is quite a pity since the text itself has plenty of emotional shifts, juxtapositions and changes in thought processes. The performance may be improved if the text is  given more time to breathe and settle with the audience, before shuffling from one story to another. Regardless of weaknesses in text, direction and delivery, Selma remains a charismatic performer and she embodies the beauty of transformation in her body – illustrating the changes in atmosphere, time and thoughts with clarity.

“Afresh, Afresh, Afresh”

Reviewer: Alex Foo
Performance: 11 June 2016

Trees, A Crowd emerges as exceedingly relevant in light of the proposed Cross Island Line and the potential incursions into the Central Catchment Nature Reserve. The assumption that  politically charged plays run the risk of sacrificing story and subtlety for stridency and didacticism is not entirely unfounded here. Playwright-director Irfan Kasban is not one for subtlety – he cranks up the kitsch levels and brings the audience through a spin cycle of courtroom drama, a talk show, sexy advertisement, public consultation and the twittering Twitterverse in a mere 90 minutes. The ensemble (comprising Jo Tan, Faizal Abdullah, Shafiqah Efandi, Chng Xin Xuan) hams it up in a charade of caricatures and the debate plays out like a farce.

Beside this development versus conservation debate, there is a snide running meta-commentary on millennials, theatre in Singapore and the power imbalance between the state and non-profit organisations. At some point, the issue of foreign workers is also thrown into the mix, with a comparison made between how trees and imported labour are both so easily replaceable. One starts to sense that beneath all this business lies an exasperation with both institutions and unproductive chatter.

In the few scenes where Kasban cuts through the farce with more pensive moments and monologues, what results are arresting mise-en-scènes on their own, where bare bulbs dangle like fruit from a tree. But because the whole set-up has been so non-naturalist and parodic, these scenes operate out of sync with a play that paradoxically is hyper-aware of its own artifice.

I was reminded of Drama Box’s The Lesson (2015) that broached the similar topic of development and heritage through forum theatre; both of which ended in the ineluctable tune of progress – the thunderous clangor of a wrecking ball. The crucial difference, however, was the sense of agency present in The Lesson, which is utterly bereft in Trees. ‘What can a bunch of actors do!’ a character cries. Now I wonder what Minister Grace Fu in the audience has to say about that.

“National Memory Project”

Reviewer: Dawn Teo
Performance: 10 June 2016

Every citizen has to contribute a memory to the memory corps to facilitate organisation, research, discovery and eventually, archive. When a convicted murderer on death row is forced to share a memory, a confrontation ensues with the officer tasked with this job. In the hopes of moving towards the future, they are both forced to retrace their paths made in the past.

Written by Johnny Jon Jon and co-directed with Nadia Cheriyan, the focus of this 50-minute play is on the text as well as the individual characters.

There are more questions unearthed than answered. The result is bittersweet for me. The issues tackled reflect a part of Singapore that is seldom questioned today – the need for constant construction and upgrading, turning a blind eye to what we sacrifice in the process and leaving certain people behind.

Presented in Malay, English as well as certain Chinese dialects, National Memory Project captures the individual stories of each character and offers them to the audience to ponder. The use of surtitles ensures inclusiveness.

To exemplify inclusiveness, the team has a cue for all Muslim members of the audience to break  their fast during the show. The cue is cleverly included into the play as a sip of water made by one of their actors. The gesture is very heartwarming, especially in a multiracial country such as ours.

The team chooses to use multimedia as a clever tool to transcend space and time. Beyond the usual showings of videos and photographs to keep the story moving along, there are also portions of the play where persons appear in video-form to converse with a live actor. Using these videos as a manifestation of memory, the audience witnesses the absences and presences of memory in play. It is a slight pity that sometimes, the audio recording together with the videos are not as clear and some words are lost.

Besides two screens to present the videos and surtitles, a simple table, bench and chair is all that make up the set. The simplicity is functional and helps with directing the audiences’ focus onto the two actors on stage.

As part of The Twenty-Something Festival, National Memory Project is a play that speaks about current affairs and is unafraid to question our current societal structure. A simple yet strong work, it brings story-telling to its basic form and appeals to us in its sincerity and relevance.

“Long Weekend”

Reviewer: Isaac Lim
Performance: 11 June 2016

Audiences are welcomed into the multi-purpose hall, rebranded as a classroom space, and prepare themselves for a (tardy) lesson about gay relationship issues and gay history of Singapore.

To this reviewer, that is what Long Weekend is about.

A “Fresh!” production that’s part of the Twenty-Something Theatre Festival, the 45- minute performance starts with an over-the-top pre-show. Recorded tracks of speeches from both camps of the LGBT movement are on repeat (the one by a certain Ms Thio’s about straws in noses stands out), and some of the actors try to catch the dick-head-cross-bred-bitch (yes, an actor with a phallic object as a head prop, barking across the stage). Those frivolous 15 minutes add nothing to the narrative.

Long Weekend details the relationship between two young men, Han Lin, the closeted, slightly love-hungry boy, and his “BFF”, Keith, the outgoing and vivacious one whose every action screams “I’m gay”. The “long weekend” refers to the weekend of Keith’s wake, as Han Lin attempts to come to terms with his friend’s death, their friendship, and his sexuality.

Poignant moments where the two leads banter about life and occasionally share sweet nothings are interjected with phantasmagorical scenes. These scenes make political statements (the nation’s 50 years of independence) or revisit Singapore’s LGBT history (a character revisiting Fort Road beach, and another reminiscing about 21 Tanjong Pagar Road).

The overall hyper-real setting of works, as the disparate elements come together quite well. The energy of the supporting ensemble do not match the heightened atmosphere in most scenes. Despite the small performance space, many of the actors’ texts are not clear, either due to the background sounds, or their own delivery.

The play, written by Kenneth Chia and directed by Mitchell Fang, can be improved with more focus. While this reviewer appreciates the avoidance of melodrama, the relationship between the leads can be developed further through performance and not exposition. Chia must be applauded for his grip on the naturalistic dialogues, as the conversations and banter between the characters flow well and are pleasing to the eyes and ears.

Long Weekend appears to be “the gay play” of the festival, attracting a packed house of mostly men on a Saturday afternoon. However, it adds little to the LGBT literature of Singapore, as there are obvious shadows from works like Alfian Sa’at’s Dreamplay and Landmarks, and perhaps Andrew Sunderland’s Ragnarok.

As the audience leave the classroom-performance space, this reviewer is ambivalent. So much is raised on stage but nothing quite happens. The themes in this play can be better explored.